For the past several months, basketball promoter John Walsh has been plotting and planning and working the phones. Last Saturday he got what he wanted. The country’s number one team, the DeMatha High Stags, flew in from Maryland to battle the third-ranked King High Jaguars.
In 1995 he arranged his first great showdown, bringing Rock Island to DePaul’s Alumni Hall to play Farragut. “That was the Farragut team with Kevin Garnett and Ronnie Fields. Alumni Hall was packed,” he remembered.
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“I’ve been working on getting DeMatha to come here for a long time,” said Walsh. “At the end of last year you could see this as a dream matchup, because we all knew these were two premier teams. DeMatha has those great guards in Joe Forte and Keith Bogans. And King has the big center, Leon Smith, and [all-star junior guard] Imari Sawyer. So I just got on the phone and wouldn’t get off. Finally, Wootten agreed. Both coaches were taking a risk. As long as they never play each other they can both claim they’re the best. I think they wanted the challenge.”
DeMatha’s impressive showing ignited talk that they might be the best high school team ever, though a few Public League diehards wondered if DeMatha was even the best on the court Saturday. “I’d like to see them play Westinghouse–their defense was spectacular,” said Weincord. “[Walsh] ought to bring them back tomorrow to play DeMatha.”
I wrote about the matter (in the August 16, 1996, Reader) and so did several other writers, including Kevin Blackistone, sports columnist for the Dallas Morning News, who quoted Richard Durham’s son, Mark. “It was such a ludicrous comment I didn’t take it seriously at first,” Mark Durham told me then. “How could [Costas] say the story’s apocryphal? It’s in Ali’s own book.”
So that’s where things stood, until Ali weighed in with a different version in an interview with Tribune sportswriter Fred Mitchell. “With a hint of bitterness nearly four decades later, Ali recalled the indignity of returning to Louisville after winning a gold medal in the 1960 Olympics, only to be denied entrance to a restaurant in his hometown,” Mitchell wrote in the November 15 Tribune. “Ali, in disgust, threw that gold medal into the Ohio River, saying it was not worth having if his freedom was denied.
